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Maier, Vivian

(Encyclopedia)Maier, Vivian, 1926–2009, American photographer, b. Bronx, N.Y. She spent much of her childhood and early adulthood in France, where she began photographing street scenes; she moved in 1951 to New Y...

La Fontaine, Jean de

(Encyclopedia)La Fontaine, Jean de zhäN də [key], 1621–95, French poet, whose celebrated fables place him among the masters of world literature. He was born at Château-Thierry to a bourgeois family. A restless...

Davies, Robertson

(Encyclopedia)Davies, Robertson (William Robertson Davies) dāˈvĭs [key], 1913–95, Canadian writer and editor. After receiving a B.Litt. from Oxford (1938), he joined the Old Vic Theatre Company before returnin...

Edda

(Encyclopedia)Edda ĕdˈə [key], title applied to two distinct works in Old Icelandic. The Poetic Edda, or Elder Edda, is a collection (late 13th cent.) of 34 mythological and heroic lays, most of which were compo...

Jehovah's Witnesses

(Encyclopedia)Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian group originating in the United States at the end of the 19th cent., organized by Charles Taze Russell, whose doctrine centers on the Second Coming of Christ. The Witnes...

Thousand and One Nights

(Encyclopedia)Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights, series of anonymous stories in Arabic, considered as an entity to be among the classics of world literature. The cohesive plot device concerns the efforts of...

Lewis, Sinclair

(Encyclopedia)Lewis, Sinclair, 1885–1951, American novelist, b. Sauk Centre, Minn., grad. Yale Univ., 1908. Probably the greatest satirist of his era, Lewis wrote novels that present a devastating picture of midd...

Kafka, Franz

(Encyclopedia)Kafka, Franz fränts käfˈkä [key], 1883–1924, German-language novelist, b. Prague. Along with Joyce, Kafka is perhaps the most influential of 20th-century writers. From a middle-class Jewish fami...

Lawrence, D. H.

(Encyclopedia)Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert Lawrence), 1885–1930, English author, one of the primary shapers of 20th-century fiction. Lawrence believed that industrialized Western culture was dehumanizing beca...

Mill, John Stuart

(Encyclopedia)Mill, John Stuart, 1806–73, British philosopher and economist. A precocious child, he was educated privately by his father, James Mill. In 1823, abandoning the study of law, he became a clerk in the...
 

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